Contracting for a new company website most often is a highly frustrating experience. How do I decide on a web development company? How much should I pay for a website? What platform should I get? How much time will it take? What's it going to do for me?

Company websites today are built on an endless variety of platforms but can be bucketed into two categories and two categories only:

One of marketers’ and business owners’ greatest pain points is contracting for a website redo. You know how it goes: After vetting many agencies, you finally hire one. Then, you spend countless hours on design choices, strategy sessions, team meetings, and content planning.

The newest trend in website construction is Growth Driven Design built on the Hubspot COS platform. Only about 900 agencies worldwide currently are trained and certified to create and maintain this new model of website design.

Hubspot’s Growth Driven Design is an exciting, new set of strategies and practices that when executed, produce a website that will never grow old or stale. So, say “good bye” to website redesign projects forever.

With any website dated from about 2002-2005 on, both the visual portion and the backend portion relies on the so-called “theme.”

In my mega review covering choosing between WordPress and Hubspot, I mentioned most websites have not one, but two themes: The first theme displays what everyone coming to the Internet sees—the frontend—and the second, the part you can edit, is normally called, "the backend." All edits, pages changes, settings changes, and coding changes occur under the hood, on the backend.

Making a comparison of WordPress and Hubspot can involve many factors including cost, popularity, and even what your web designer recommends. But if you’re interested in mission-critical features like ease of use and performance, you might consider having the latest technology as being vital to your goals.

How to improve SEO should be one of your deciding points in trying to choose between popular platforms like WordPress or Hubspot.

One of the most overlook SEO metrics is page load speed.

You may be aware that slow loading pages can impact search engine rankings negatively, especially on mobile devices. Focusing on ways to improve SEO page load speed can help your ranking and help your visitors not become annoyed by your slow loading website as well.

WordPress is one of the best known and most popular software applications for website development today. It’s popularity is bolstered by the plethora of plugins and free or cheap themes available. Because of those assets, WordPress remains as a top contender to the many other CMS (Content Management Systems) from which to choose.

There are many ways to get leads through construction marketing. Here are a few:

Referrals: Excellent, because customers whom you delight are your best promoters.

Networking: The relationships you develop within professional organizations can be a great source of leads.

Traditional marketing: Printed brochures, rack cards, ads in key publications, radio and T.V. spots all form the backbone of traditional marketing.

Recurring sales: A certain percentage of growth should come from your current customer base.

Using Digital Marketing to Acquire Leads

This is the construction marketing realm where you can measure everything. Much of the good metrics that have been compiled now indicate a huge percentage (almost everybody) begins his or her buyers’ journey using the Internet.

All good construction marketing strategies center on a balanced, full-funnel plan of action. However, the grand majority of marketing plans are imbalanced: They focus heavily on one aspect of marketing while completely ignoring others.

If you’re a marketer, or are responsible for business development, or are a company owner doing construction marketing, you shouldn’t have to know buzz words to crush your marketing goals.

But since the world of digital marketing can be enormously confusing, being well versed with a few important buzz words can help. They can help especially if you’re trying to screen potential agencies.

Planning a website redo? One the first questions that’s bound to come up in your initial strategy session is, “What platform are we going to use?”

Website platforms are important. A website platform is like the engine in your vehicle—it’s the thing that makes the website display all your content, how it’s optimized, and how easy (or not so easy) it is for you to edit something.

In website design, there are two—and only two—current design trends: UX Design and Content RichDesign. These two compete for attention just as the proverbial Chevy vs. Ford debates did you’ve heard since you were a kid.

Back in the early days of the Internet, in the 90’s, I, and everyone else, were building websites using HTML and CSS display languages. Then came some programming languages like PERL and JavaScript that allowed us to do some fancy stuff, like install slideshows and send email through a website.

I recently attended Boston’s Inbound 2016 marketing conference along with about 15,000 other marketing and sales professionals. There, I heard David Baker from ReCourses hammer away about not being able to guarantee marketing results. Who says stuff like that? ReCourses is a very successful agency. Why? Because they are transparent.

My company, Cohort Marketing, is at the leading edge of a new trend that blows the old pricing and delivery model out of the water. Our Agile marketing model with story point pricing takes all the mystery out of project delivery and puts you in the driver's seat.

Construction marketing SEO occupies two realms: On-page SEO and off-page SEO. The tactics you execute between these two kinds of SEO very greatly. SEO, of course, is one of the key elements of inbound marketing for construction companies that will attract visitors and lead to more closed deals through the content on your website.

On-page SEO: Is everything you are in control of—we’re going to look at these things in a moment.

Off-page SEO: Is everything you are not in control of—such as how much people like or dislike your website, links that people post on their social media accounts, and who is talking about your company it on other blog articles.

The strategic path I most often recommend for construction marketing SEO involves three first steps. While each of the following steps would be customized for your company, the overall game plan is to use your website as a marketing tool to grow your business.

Our primary concern is helping you achieve your marketing and sales goals. If you buy without knowing the value you're getting, and are not totally delighted, we know you're going to cut and run at your earliest opportunity.

Helping clients to get leads, convert them into customers, and streamline their sales processes always has been our primary passion. We excel by being able to deliver marketing strategies and initiatives that help your company grow and save costs by producing positive marketing ROI.